Theodora FitzGibbon's lemon cake recipe turned out to be highly satisfactory, yielding a moist but light and crumbly cake tasting convincingly of lemon. I am a fan of lemon flavoured cakes and puddings. Faced with a choice between lemon tart and chocolate pudding, the lemon wins. Apart from the pure taste of the lemon, there's something appealing about the mouth puckering hint of sharpness under the sweetness. I made a lemon meringue pie the other day following the recipe in Good Housekeeping, a blast straight from the 1970s, and we didn't even pretend we were eating it ironically. Waitrose's own brand lemon gelatao, on the other hand, was a sad disappointment when we tried it, cloying and not clean on the palette. Serves me right for not making my own.
I'm left with a lingering urge to buy her book. As well as the Cumbrian lemon cake I copied out a recipe for Robert Southey's gooseberry pie, which has a top crust of slightly sweetened egg enriched shortcrust sprinkled with sugar. I've made that in the past and it was good, apart from the fact that I let the top catch slightly, but that's not Theodora FitzGibbon's fault. I like gooseberries in much the same way as I like lemons, charmed by the remaining hint of sharpness, though I can't imagine gooseberry gelato would be much good.
I don't objectively need any more cookery books. If I were to volunteer to take over all the cooking at home, starting now, and followed a different recipe out of a book for every meal, I couldn't cook my way through all the books in the time left to us before we die, or are removed to an old people's home where access to sharp knives and hot stoves is restricted for our own safety and that of the other residents. I have cooked at least a couple of dishes out of most of my existing cookery library, though admittedly not the one about Tibetan monastery food where all the recipes cater for at least forty, but I enjoy reading them. A well written cookery book is a piece of social history as much as a practical source of instructions on what to make for dinner tonight. It's interesting to compare recipes from different times and places, with their overlaps, similarities and divergences, much like multiple versions of folk songs.
Theodora FitzGibbon was famous in her time, from what I can discover. The phrase 'doyenne of Irish cookery writing' crops up several times on the internet, she had a column in the Irish Times, took fifteen years over an all encompassing study of The Food of the Western World, and became the first president of the Irish Food Writers' Guild. She also seems to have been quite a gal, hanging out in Paris with Cocteau and Picasso, and in London with Bacon, Freud and Dylan Thomas, and spending the advance on her first cookery book on a Henry Moore gouache. A Taste of the Lake District, by which I am so intrigued at second hand, was one of a successful series (thank you Wikipedia) which did indeed incorporate history, geography, and illustrations.
She died in 1991, and I assumed her books were out of print and that I'd missed the boat on A Taste of the Lake District by approximately thirty years. When I've looked in the past on Amazon, it was only available second hand at exorbitant prices. Looking again the number of copies for sale has increased, prices starting at a penny and finishing in three figures. I wouldn't fancy a used cookery book for a penny. I'm squeamish about overly grubby old books anyway, unless I've had them from new and the grub is all my own. But Alibris has a copy of the 1980 Pan edition graded as five stars, fine/like new, clean and shiny, for under ten pounds, and as I now know, the shipping cost from Texas, USA is the same as from Bournemouth. What is new is that this April a young Irish food writer brought out a collection of her recipes so that a fresh generation of cookery enthusiasts can discover her, and existing fans replace their battered copies or newspaper clippings. It is his choice of her recipes, with photographs, but I'm not entirely convinced. Why not go back to the original source, assuming that Alibris' vendors are telling the truth about the condition of their stock?
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